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Join with Less Government

The Barack Obama Administration has spent just about its entire tenure doing things it is not supposed to do.

The myriad executive branch Departments, Agencies, Commissions and Boards have been in omni-directional fashion vastly exceeding their authority – doing things that are clearly the Constitutional purview of (amongst other others) the legislative and judicial branches.

In so doing, these many Leviathan tentacles leave unattended the things they are actually supposed to do.

The examples of proactive overreaches and attending abrogations are nearly without limit.

The Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is no less distracted by wander-power-lust.

The FCC is supposed to operate within the confines of the 1996 Telecommunications Act – the last time the legislative branch laid out the FCC’s parameters. Does the law need a rewrite? To be sure. But Congressional gridlock is not a green light for President Obama or his FCC to exceed existing authority.

The 1996 Act intentionally left the Internet almost completely unregulated – which is why it has become the free speech-free market Xanadu we all know and love. Why on Earth would we want to increase government control of the Internet? We shouldn’t – and most of us don’t.

But of course Obama’s FCC does. Without any actual legal authority, it is working tirelessly to dramatically increase government imposition on the Web.

Meanwhile, the very few things on which the FCC is supposed to move – aren’t moving. Key amongst these is identifying and mapping government-controlled wireless spectrum – so as to prep it for sale to the private sector.

Private wireless service is hurtling heroically forward – getting routinely, exponentially faster and ever more accommodating of ever more data. But video use is exploding – and video is a gi-normous bandwidth hog. The wireless revolution has been and is amazing – but it needs more spectrum to deal with the ever increasing video and data use and continue its phenomenal-ness.

Spectrum is a finite resource – and not all spectrum is equal. Think of it as a Monopoly board. Some of it is minimally useful Baltic and Mediterranean Avenue, some of it premiere Boardwalk and Park Place – and the rest exists all around the board.

The federal government holds about 60% of all spectrum – much of it of the higher and highest quality. And they are using it woefully inefficiently (shocker). And they have no idea exactly what they have (shocker) – which is where the FCC is supposed to come in.

The FCC has been promising for years to map government’s spectrum, clear as much of it as possible – and get it out the door for private sector use.

But they haven’t been doing their actual job – because they’ve been far too consumed with doing everyone else’s.

The FCC – the entire Obama Administration – needs to get back to their legitimate, legal parameters.